Fighting between Somali police and Islamist gunmen killed eight people in Mogadishu on Monday, witnesses said, raising the stakes as a new president tries to bring stability to the failed Horn of Africa state.

Clashes between hardline Islamists from the al Shabaab group and a rival militia also killed six people in the central Bay region, but officials from all factions declined to comment.

Residents said the latest battles in the capital broke out on the road linking the strategic K4 junction with the hilltop presidential palace, Villa Somalia.

A Sudanese aid worker was shot dead in front of his family on Monday night in the war-ravaged region of Darfur, according to aid officials.

Mark Simmons, Sudan country director of Fellowship for African Relief, an aid and development agency that focuses on Sudan, said the aid worker may have been killed for refusing to hand over his satellite phone.

The sign outside the clinic in Otash camp reads “8-hour service daily.”

On Friday, Haider Ismael al-Amin lay in his mother’s arms, his 10-year-old body withered and weak from dehydration after a night of vomiting. But the door to the clinic was locked. After 30 minutes of waiting, his family gave up.

“The white people used to come every day,” said Hawa Hamal Mohammed, a relative of the boy. “Now the clinic is closed.”

A new rebel push in Congo’s wild, wild east is threatening to mar recent progress toward peace and plunge one of the world’s most war-ravaged regions into a fresh humanitarian crisis.

From Jan. 21 until late February, the Congolese Army joined neighboring Rwanda in a surprise offensive against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia suspected of committing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and wreaking havoc in the mineral-rich mountains of eastern Congo ever since.